All success is driven by unhappiness

[enchanted]

4 hours ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

Yes - I was expanding on a point, not necessarily arguing its counter. Sometimes people post to add in an insight that may have been provoked or a differing view.

I just don't think the only reason to learn something is because we are unhappy with some other aspect. It is an assumption this has to come from some place negative. What of wonder and curiosity as motivators? Enjoyment of the process of learning? Exploration? or integration - I might want to learn something not because I feel I have inadequate knowledge but to connect separate pieces and cross pollenate my mind...

I think looking at this process of success in some domain (here, as learning) as born of negativity is a perspective and not found in direct experience because "unhappiness" is self generated as an internal friction. As an emotion within conscious beings. We could look at unhappiness further as "aversion" - but this is a different claim.

Is a tree unhappy and expands up, grows leaves and photosynthesises because it is unhappy? I would say that is success (the tree gets to eat and feed itself via absorbing sunlight and transmuting it) but unhappiness is not required. 

Leo isn't always correct. I really critically assess his claims myself (as he wants us to do). Was "only" in his claim? I do not recall.

Cool, you also have a valid and valuable perspective that we love hearing. Thanks for sharing! 

[enchanted]

1 hour ago, Joseph Maynor said:

I feel like unhappiness brings the absence of success.  

True as well. Rock on brother

[oOo]

On 11/08/2026 at 0:42 PM, oOo said:

The structure is basically right, though @enchanted, the anthropomorphic terms are not, and that's an important read given many are likely to be easily influenced by speakers like these into falsity. “Success” is only one possible terminal outcome, while “unhappiness” is better understood as salient disequilibrium, so a discrepancy between current and, say, preferred states of being. “Driven by” is the conversion of that discrepancy into directional activation, so:

disequilibrium > salience > activation > momentum > stabilisation or threshold transition

That said, neither stability nor threshold-crossing is intrinsically positive. Because stability is neutral, without sufficient awareness a system can stabilise around a maladaptive attractor state and then simply drift through entropy into almost any negative state you want to imagine, from depression to, Ellen DeGeneres drinking baby blood between stage appearances  [ Look it up! It's all real I tell you! ]

Threshold here is an even more important distinction because transition can go up or down. Further degradation can move toward major depression, upward movement can recover prior stability, or activation can enter an expulsive state that opens the possibility of corrective energetic action, like lots of physical exercise as one crude BDNF-positive example.

That is the deeper error in “success is driven by unhappiness.” Frustration > thought, deprivation > pursuit, rejection > fame-seeking, and conflict > creation are all manifestations of the same regulatory architecture. Achievement does not necessarily resolve the originating disequilibrium and/or instability. People can repeatedly discharge the same “itch” while preserving the meaning-field generating it. If drinking baby blood was a bad idea to begin with, drinking more of it is never going to satisfy the underlying instability.

If a consciousness’s meaning-field is fucked, i.e. the subconscious values inherited from its respective culture, then it can become even more fucked if it never develops the awareness required to interrogate its perspectives on itself, what it is capable of, and reality in general, then consciously integrate the new values it needs. Awareness cannot merely be cognitive either. Emotional awareness and emotional agency matter because awareness acts as a catalyst for integrating new values into consciousness. Lack of awareness does the opposite, shifting someone from enjoying a bit of metaphorical baby blood here and there to becoming leader of the blood tribe, or who knows, maybe getting downgraded to Trump blood donations as tribal punishment.

Overall then, disequilibrium generates directional momentum toward apparent stability or transition, while awareness helps determine whether that trajectory becomes adaptive, pathological or destructive.

For intellectual growth it is important to find the motif behind the motif, especially in subjects already heavily loaded by culture. This thread is a perfect example of how consciousness can accept a contextualisation because its logic looks accurate on the surface while remaining false underneath the hood, and by that degree unintentionally damage itself precisely because it initially “feels right.” The relationship between cultural value correction and self-reality perception is therefore a good example for the **Re-contextualisation Mega-Thread.**

All energy is seeking a fate. Which one are you going to consciously give it? This is why we invent instrumental physical actions from types of meditation to extremely regimented psychedelic use to physical exercise to get a desired energetic outcome. They are tools we have learned to use to lever energy in particular directions, with salience determining its desired momentum.

The bigger epistemic error is that people are not being taught how to fully own that WHOLE physical process. Instead they are indoctrinated into treating regulation as though it exists outside physical processes, through things like buying shit.

How “buying shit” becomes the medium is itself important because the social is still a physical process. Until people learn to make their social process something that is not substituted for the self, however instead internally regulated and grown through the self, social adaptation can replace rather than develop self-integration.

The survival interest has been activated by social influence through a perceived potential decrease or increase in agency, though it has not necessarily been integrated through self-appraisal by emotional and cognitive awareness. That integration is where agency loss or gain, and substitutive versus direct interaction, can be reformalised within one’s meaning hierarchy rather than simply inherited as another culturalised adaptation.

 

 

So to my surprise apparently drinking blood and just general vampirism is an actual thing - SEE VIDEO BELOW.

It made me realise, I just feel like there are so many inner realities that people cohabitate in, however irrational those worlds are, that I am just completely oblivious to. On a personal level, I could argue to myself that most of these worlds I don't need to know about, but on the other side of things, we're doing our own personal development a complete disservice to our own broader integration of reality. It can definitely sometimes feel disturbing, but much more important than spending a lot of time putting yourself through that is just doing the research across many domains to just simply become aware of their existence.

The second thing it made me realise is that I need to use this experience to become more sophisticated in how I actually research the world around me. What we immediately research often has an SEO (search engines optimisation) bias to it analogically speaking, including the thoughts we have. I feel that this is very strongly the case with emotions as well, and in uniting all of those, the SEO of my broader consciousness experience. Explaining it this way to myself helps me better categorise this domain of my own personal explorations with my ability to consciously curate and create different consciousness experiences within myself. The sticking point that needs to mature and fine tune though here is integrating that with my own consciousness default and carrying out my daily responsibilities congruent with my longer term goals.

The ability to manage and separate natural identify formation the brain does whoever you are and however enlightened you are, with other potential consciousness states that I or that one could inhabit, while also maintaining consistency and judgement on one's valuation of life priorities, is a tough ask when there aren't truly any good systems out there to facilitate people on this path. From a non-psychedelics user (due to my epilepsy, where seizures themselves have their own unique impact on identity, etc that isn't fully mapped out but can connect here in some ways depending on the kinds of seizures, etc among other contextual ingredients like the environment), this is something that seems to be a pattern that many who take psychedelics seem to relate to in part, often stressing the risk of how psychedelics can ruin a persons practical life because just as one example, they may no longer attribute the same value or values to life and or practical things they need as part of their stepping stones towards personal growth. The pattern I need to come into greater understanding is the relationship between consciousness state and object-value attribution, with music as one example that everyone can relate with and how that can influence our judgements pertaining, both sometimes in a very positive way, and other times less so. That feels like the right line I need to start building a compass and clock for slowly overtime, with the discernment as well that is bigger than just doing what we see around us where people just kind of throw their arms up in the air and offer half-truths like "you're just acting out the part of pretending to be yourself", which has a lot of truth to it, but its in the absence of many other factors that create too much distortion for it to be both truly practical, and existentially revelatory, objectively speaking. I think I am not alone with many people on this forum where they experience and have consciousness experience that are simply not consistent with the simplicity of that statement, but that it does have a lot of relevance for people that are just developing into the construct aware (I.e. becoming more aware of their ego) stage of their development, as one formal way of expressing it.

My sharing of the video does not mean I endorse or agree with the authors or any guests opinions of this video, I haven't even watched it, but I promise you. I am not going to be converted into a vampire by the end, ha. I barely make it through science lab dissections, I am still learning skills to better manage my own reactions when it comes to viewing gnarly medical imagery (I.e. relating to diagnostics analysis). And that's actually a good example of how my own 'emotional blood type' was just never going to grow up to be say a forensic pathologist. Neurology and a close second psychiatry is naturally a lot closer to my schtick now.

 

[Rishabh R]

I have experienced through pain that attributing success to your actions is wiser than attributing success to other people's actioms,external results .

The former is counterintuitive and produces the paradoxical nature of success I mean more durable one whereas the latter one produces flickering or fleeting success .

I think chasing success is itself the root cause of failure. Chase discomfort which would generate success and happiness as a by product .